I host my clients’ web sites, and that’s a lot different than just having a URL that’s hosted by a “GoDaddy” solution. Friends don’t let friends use GoDaddy.

I need my clients’ web sites to be up 24/7, to have email work correctly once configured, and not to spend a lot of time troubleshooting geeky things about hosting.

Some time ago, I had a bad experience with InMotion Hosting.

So I went to BlueHost. I highly recommend these folks. Their pricing has been clear and fair. They are up 100% of the time (in my year with them), and they have a phone number that someone actually answers. YAY.

But BlueHost is making changes. They’re ditching their Reseller program, which means you can’t host your clients’ web sites under an agency account. I can, because I’ve been grandfathered in, but I’m not sure how long I’ll be sticking around.

BlueHost has also changed its policy for support — they won’t spend as much time helping you. I think a premium support plan must be on the way.

How to rate your web host

I do realize that there are many hosting providers out there. And if you need to give good or bad feedback about them, try this link:

It takes a good web writer to write economically (i.e., not too much but not too little).

A good web writer knows how to jumpstart your web site’s search engine optimization (by using words and phrases that your potential customers and qualified leads use to search for services like yours).

It takes a good web writer to treat your business objectively, giving it the content that will bring your target audience(s) to your website.

Traditionally, graphic design has been orderly: a copywriter writes the copy and a graphic designer makes it visually sing.

Somehow, this orderly universe was disrupted in 1996 or so by the incredible speed with which the Internet crashed over all of us.

The geeks — the ones who knew how to program a web page — found themselves in control of this new world. Because they didn’t know anything about graphic design, their pages looked pretty bad — and they simply required their customers to provide copy, which usually wasn’t any better.

Most small- and medium-sized businesses didn’t know enough to hire their own writers, or a producer to oversee the process and a designer to ensure that what was programmed was actually any good.

And, in some pockets of this world, this is still how business is done.

We want you to be happy with your final web site, and for nothing to be left out or forgotten in the process. And even though you may not know design principles, you know what you like. Basecamp Productions gives that to you.

In short, we let designers design and writers write. Your budget won’t know the difference, but you will. We also provide a producer to oversee the process — all at no additional cost to you. Call us today. 410.404.5559.

This lovely image comes from the Farm Security Administration and is of a Polish Farming couple. Photo by Jack Delano and assumed to be in the public domain.

Updated July 31st, 2018

“Viva public domain.” The words tantalize us with their promise of free images for our videos, web sites, and publications. Public domain images and audio can come from the government, the public, and commercial works whose copyright has expired.

But there’s a price to pay for all that free public domain candy. You need to know some basic rules, or you could wind up in court or owing someone money.

For instance, public domain does not mean “released.” “Released” indicates that the human subjects in the photo have been properly released, usually by signing a subject release form and being paid a sum of money. (more…)

So you want to prove to your boss that social media and other efforts are working.

Here are some great products that can help you.

SEMRUSH is a fantastic product, tracking local and national search engine results, as well as social media and other factors that can figure into your web site’s ranking. Subscription.

Advanced Web Ranking lets you track every key word in any search engine or directory on the Internet. Subscription.

Hub Spot lets you determine qualified leads and how to convert them. Hub Spot specializes in inbound marketing (bringing qualified leads to your site and converting them into customers). Try out HS’s free Web Site Grader to see how well your web site performs. There are also “graders” to grade your book marketing, Facebook and Twitter presence, blog, and press releases. Some free tools and a subscription plan.

I also like Spider Viewer, from WeBuildPages. Spider Viewer shows you your page as a search engine “spider” would view it — text and links. So if you want to analyze your meta information (and make sure you don’t have unwanted formatting, for instance), this is a good tool to use. It will also display all links — I’ve found this useful when considering whether my links are well worded. Free.

Last month, a client called to say he still hadn’t seen his web site appear in Google‘s listings. The web site had been up one week.

This goes to show you how much we all expect instantaneous results from anything Internet-related. But that’s not the way it is, and it won’t be for quite some time.

Now, it’s possible that my client’s web site could have made it into Google within a week. I’ve had it happen, but ONLY with web sites that have a longstanding domain name (in 2008 I redesigned my sister’s web site, Colonial Photography, now Helen’s Place Photography, and she was sitting pretty on page 1 the next day (where she’s remained) — she’d owned her URL for 12 years even though there was not one word of text on it.) Google respects longevity.

Here are some important things to remember about your new web site being found on Google:

1. URL age is still a factor, albeit a lesser one. That doesn’t mean you should buy an old URL. Rather, it means that Google respects age as an SEO factor, especially if that URL has been linked to in the past. In the case of my sister’s web site,, likely she had next-day results in 2008 because her web site, even though it had no words on it, was frequently linked to. It held a single link for her clients to view their photos.

2. Google spiders don’t “crawl” every web site every day, or every week for that matter. Google performs “fresh” crawls periodically looking for brand new stuff. But Google only performs a “deep” crawl every month, on some undetermined date (but one you can make an educated guess about if you watch closely). And, depending on a lot of factors, you may not see the results of even a deep crawl for weeks. Also, Google is under no obligation to deep crawl your site at all. If your site remains unimproved for long periods of time, it’s likely that it will take some energy to get Google’s attention again.

Here are some comments by Matt Cutts, the popular Google software engineer:

There is also not a hard limit on our crawl. The best way to think about it is that the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank. So if you have a lot of incoming links on your root page, we’ll definitely crawl that. Then your root page may link to other pages, and those will get PageRank and we’ll crawl those as well. As you get deeper and deeper in your site, however, PageRank tends to decline.

Another way to think about it is that the low PageRank pages on your site are competing against a much larger pool of pages with the same or higher PageRank. There are a large number of pages on the web that have very little or close to zero PageRank. The pages that get linked to a lot tend to get discovered and crawled quite quickly. The lower PageRank pages are likely to be crawled not quite as often. (Matt Cutts interviewed by Eric Enge, 3/14/2010)

Even though Page Rank is not supposed to be a factor any longer, there is a lot of truth to these words still.

So, here are some tips for getting found by Google faster:

1. Keep an “old” URL (but not the web site) even if you’re changing your business name. Ask your webmaster to redirect the old URL to the new. It could pay off.

2. Revise your file names. Make sure they use your keywords, and aren’t too long. Google will overlook file names that appear to be similar. I’ll give you an example. Before I knew any better, I used to add the business name to the keywords for a file name — both so the business name could be better branded and the web file names could be better organized (e.g., businessname_web_site_design.xxxx and businessname_copywriting.xxxx) (“xxxx” being the file extension for the kind of pages you use, such as .html). You may find that Google will bypass any page other than your home (index) page if you do this. Keep your most important key words near the front of the file name, and make sure they’re also used in your body text.

3. Increase the volume of your inbound and outbound links. Two otherwise identical sites will rank differently in Google based on their popularity with the world at large — particularly their peers. You can’t do any better than being linked to by people in your own business. So — make sure you’re listed in online trade directories, blog directories (you do have a blog, don’t you?), and the like. The more the merrier. Just don’t pay a “link farm” to generate random links to your web site. When Google sees that these links are bogus, you’ll be penalized. As for outbound links, these are just as important to Google.

4. Drive traffic to your web site. Blog, answer questions on LinkedIn, even advertise on Google or Facebook. Just get people to your web site. This is harder than it may sound — people want interesting and useful information. Can you provide it?

6. Give your audience incentives to move to another page. Keeping your bounce rate low is much more important than you may think.

7. Lather, rinse, repeat. It sometimes takes perseverance and consistent nurturing to gain a higher ranking on Google, but you can make great strides if you’re persistent and patient.

After about a month, my client’s web site appeared on Google, on page 1 for both of his top key words, and his was a brand-new domain. It will take him longer to reach page 1 for a much more competitive key word, but I have confidence that in his market area we will demonstrate more perseverance than his competition. I’ll let you know how we do.

Oh, what is the Google dance? If you watch search engine results pages (SERPs) rankings daily, as I do, you’ll see that your web pages’ rankings will jockey around quite a bit — up by three points here, and down by one there. That’s the dance to pay attention to.

I shared a Facebook link this morning to a PBS story about a new degree program at Columbia University, Medill School of Journalism that will create journalist/programmers. To me it made perfect sense, and I said so. I immediately heard back from an old friend.

“Geeks instead of journalists?” he wrote.

“Not instead,” I said. I told him that in my opinion individuals are demanding more control over content than ever before — no longer (if ever) the realm of a programmer.

I also said that, IMHO, writers and designers have historically been separated at birth as far as the web goes. Not for all companies, of course — there are many fine examples of well-designed web sites. I’d say they’re few and far between.

But for the masses? A company generally calls a web design company, who offers a design but no copy — the web design company considers web copy the responsibility of the company. So, as in so many media tragedies, the company calls up its PR person and asks that she or he produce copy for the web site.

Why is this happening when there’s a long history of tight relationships between writers and designers as far as advertising and print collateral? Hard to say exactly, but I think part of it has to do with money and speed. The web has grown so quickly that an infrastructure to support its proper execution has never solidified. Geeks went out and got the jobs that writers and content people didn’t know how to execute themselves. And content went begging.

Not only that, but web designers aren’t always the best people to judge usability. Every time you go to a web site and can’t find the thing you came to find — someone was asleep (or missing) at the wheel.

This scenario is changing, thank goodness. WYSIWYG design programs are getting easier to use even if their users don’t fully understand HTML. Blogging software, incredibly easy for anyone to set up and use, is now fair game for designing full web sites. There are many, many templates available for non-designers and programmers to use. In other words, it’s possible for a content person to “come over to the other side.” Cost, among other factors, has made it so.

Also, web consumers are becoming savvier about what works and what doesn’t. We don’t have that much patience for web sites that don’t work as we need them to. So it makes sense that those who are better at organization, usability, and writing are taking back their birthright.

And, as time goes by, we’ll see the gap narrow even more, as software and e-learning each accelerate. Certainly there will always be a market for technicians, but there will be a larger market for content people who can create anything from an electronic newsletter to an interactive web site at a much lower cost than is now possible.

My friend wrote back, “I hope you’re right. I’m just an old newspaper guy suspicious of technocrats and J-schools on principle.”

I say he and I will both be satisfied with the outcome. The medium will always be the message, and the message needs to be controlled by the many.